


The Tenderness of Wolves

by Scarlett_Ribbon



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2017-12-26 07:16:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/963132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scarlett_Ribbon/pseuds/Scarlett_Ribbon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Kill the girl," he murmurs, "and let the wolf be born."</p>
<p>The game has changed, not ended - and by the time they realise she's playing, it's too late to stop what she's set in motion. Or How Sansa and Arya Save the North Despite Being on Different Continents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They call her Alayne in the Vale, but this bastard born girl has never been to Winterfell. She dreams of it though, this great ruined castle in the North. She wanders the halls, and it is quiet. Dead. The smell of smoke hangs thick and heavy on the air, even now. Wolves surround the castle, still and silent.

_What am I doing here?_ she thinks, but does not stop. Her feet seem to know where to take her, even if her head does not. The direwolf padding softly in front of her seems to know the way, too.

_Lady,_ a voice whispers, _Lady, Lady, Lady…_

 In the great hall where the Starks once sat, she finds a Lord with a weeping red line across his neck, still wearing the clothes in which he died.

“Father,” the word falls from her lips in surprise and Alayne’s head is a tangled mess because father is Lord Baelish, not this man with sad grey eyes and –

 Eddard Stark touches her face with cold, dead fingers. “You’re lost.”

For some strange reason she wants to cry. She used to dream of that day on the steps of the Sept, over and over – will always be haunted by the swing of the sword on his bent neck, before she was Alayne.

 “I’m scared.”

“There must always be a Stark in Winterfell,” Lord Eddard reminds her gently. Sadly. Lady sits by her father’s side, watching her. She expects to see betrayal in the eyes of her dead, but there is only infinite sadness.

  _I don’t want to,_ she thinks. And then, _I’m the only one left._

She swallows, blinks back tears.

“Winter is coming.” It sounds like a question, even to her. Alayne has taken over so much that she’s begun to forget the words. Were they ever really hers, though? The daughter he knew worshiped the Seven, in place of the Old Gods and spent all her days dreaming of the South.

“Winter _is_ coming,” her father affirms, voice and expression grave. Somehow the words give her chills in a way they never did before.

 He kisses her brow softly and she really does cry then, loud and hysteric, nothing like the delicate tears ladies shed in songs. Outside the wolves start to howl.

“You are a Stark of Winterfell,” he murmurs, safe and familiar and _gone._ Suddenly she is alone in the hall, but his voice lingers. Lady is gone, too.

 “Wake up Sansa,” her father’s ghost whispers.

When she opens her eyes, Sansa can still hear the howling of the wolves.

* * *

_The Tenderness of Wolves_

* * *

It’s difficult, after that, to slip back into Alayne’s skin. During the day, she pulls up the mask over her face readily enough – but not without effort, not without having to concentrate, to _pretend._

Her defences from herself have been stripped away.

Other things, scary things, start to filter back in. 

  " _You told me to put the tears in Jon's wine and I did…I wrote Catelyn and told her the Lannisters had killed my Lord husband just as you said!"_

 The Queen called Sansa stupid more times than she can count – she and Joffrey both – but she’s clever enough to recognise her Aunt’s ramblings for what they are.

 She _was_ stupid though, to think she could trust him.

 "King Tommen requires my presence in the royal city," Lord Baelish announces mildly, rolling up the letter in his hands and slipping it into a pocket. "An unavoidable duty I'm afraid, sweetling."

Sansa lays down the brush she has been running slowly through her darkened hair taking care to look uncertain and vulnerable – like the little bird who escaped so fearfully from Kings Landing.

 Her face in the mirror is cold and pale, as though her features are made of ivory.

"I hope you will not be away long, father. I'm not sure what to do in your absence."

He smiles and strolls across the room to stand behind her chair. She stares at their reflections in the mirror as he slides hands onto her shoulders, twirls a lock of her hair between his fingers.

"You are such a good, sweet girl, Alayne. There is no need for you to worry," he says, bending closer so that his mouth hovers by her ear. "No one can touch you here."

 Sansa sits very still with the mask of Alayne pulled up and over her face. "Yes."

Petyr pulls away, his lips just barely brushing her earlobe. She forces herself to ignore the flash of something distinctly _not_ fatherly in his eyes, before he composes his expression back into that of her kindly protector.

"I will send word of my return," he tells her. "Until then, play with Lord Robert and keep him happy. Do you understand?"

"Yes father," Sansa makes herself smile sweetly, eyes sweeping modestly down to her clasped hands. "I understand."

When he’s gone she turns back to her reflection. _Ice,_ she tells herself, _not ivory. I am made of ice._

Carefully, Sansa takes a sheaf of paper from the desk of her vanity and begins to write. She wonders if Robb felt like this when they crowned him King; that he was perching on a precipice just waiting to swallow him whole -

(and in the back of her mind, she sets aside a place for vengeance because her brother was honourable and beautiful and _hers_ ).

 Her words disappear with the dawn. She wonders if the sick feeling in her stomach is why there are no songs about fair maidens saving themselves. It’s easier to wait for a man with a sword, she thinks. It’s easier to be rescued, than to play the hero of the story.

(All of Sansa’s heroes are already dead).

* * *

“I wondered about you, child.”

Sansa doesn’t smile, doesn’t move. The dye hasn’t washed out of her hair yet, not completely, but she’s wearing the Tully colours and when Bronze Yohn looks at her, she sees the glow of recognition in his eyes, bright like the summer sun.

“You were right about Lord Baelish,” is all she says, in a voice that, while not Alayne’s, is not quite her own either. “You were right not to trust him.”

His face is a thunderstorm slowly brewing and it reassures her. She plays it carefully, every word calculated. She lets him read the truth of all she knows in her face, in her Tully blue eyes.

“Tell me what he has done,” he commands her. “And tell it true, my lady. No harm will come to you.”

Sansa swallows, treading a thin line between who she is and the role she must play to win the support of house Royce.

 “The singer Marillion did not push my Aunt, Lady Lysa, out the Moon Door... It was Lord Baelish who killed her.”

“ _Seven hells_.” It is a curse that slips his lips, black and terrible like the swell of an angry ocean. Sansa watches his hands clench into fists and the dangerous narrowing of his eyes.

“You have to help me,” she implores him, before the tide can rise up and drag him under – before he can smash through the carefully constructed plan she has and leave her bare in the ruins. “ _Please.”_

Something in her face must reach him, because men – oh, she knows them now, cruel men, clever men, honourable men.

 Honourable men do not leave little birds to die.

“You lied,” he pointed out, not quite accusing. “You lied for him, child. You got up in front of everyone and swore he told the truth.”

Sansa’s smile is as brittle as the frost that set on the grass in the Godswood at Winterfell. “And do you think I did so willingly, Lord Royce? Lord Baelish is currently the only man standing between myself and the Queen – and he just murdered his own wife in cold blood. Only a simpleton would have told the truth of my Aunt’s death.”

“You’re telling the truth now.” There is a question in there somewhere, one which makes her hide her hands in her lap. The firelight casts shadows across Bronze Yohn’s face, and, she suspects, her own.

“Do you know how Joffrey Baratheon died?” she asks, thinking of poison, the hands of a wrinkled old lady and Littlefinger’s cold-eyed smile. She thinks of puppets and how she plans to cut the strings.

“Poisoned by the Queen’s brother, apparently.”

Sansa shakes her head, leaning back in her chair. “Murdered, because of a plot between Lord Baelish and the Tyrell’s. I saw him die, choking, clawing at his throat until his fingers were dripping with his own blood. They smuggled the poison into the feast on my hairnet. I had no idea.”

“Why are you telling me this, child?”

She’s surprised she needs to spell it out; perhaps the finer subtleties of politics and intrigue are beyond him. Or maybe he’s too honourable.

_Like father,_ she thinks. _Like Robb._

“Lord Baelish murdered the King of Westeros and no one suspects a thing, Lord Royce. How long do you think it will be before my cousin dies, now that Littlefinger is Lord Protector? Sweetrobin is such a sickly child, you know. And of course, Lord Baelish has a lovely, natural-born daughter he can marry to Sweetrobin’s heir. How long do you think it’ll be before _he_ dies, too?”

For a long moment, the only sound is the crackling of the fire in the grate. His face is unreadable and Sansa has no way of knowing if she has saved or doomed herself.

 Then his eyes swing up to fix on her eyes – blue as her birthright, blue like her mother’s. Blue like the King in the North’s were. She knows, then, that she has him in the palm of her hand.

“What would you have me do, Lady Stark?”

Sansa smiles.

* * *

The gown she wears to greet her bannermen is deep blue silk, cinched in tightly at the waist. It brings out the colour of her eyes, the slowly returning red in her hair. This first appearance is everything; Sansa chooses everything with the utmost care, creating the image that will achieve her ends.

 In the back of her mind, she thinks of Cersei, who said it was better to be feared than loved. She remembers a riot and a siege, a boy-king who would not be controlled.

Sansa remembers her father – her real father, now reclaimed – and how he had one of his men dine with him every night. The North declared war on Eddard Stark’s behalf because they loved him.

_I will make them love me, too._

 In the mirror she is pale porcelain and big lovely eyes. Beautiful and demure, but not a little girl playing at leadership.

“You look beautiful, Lady Stark,” Mya says, from where she stands by the door. “Like your mother.”

“You met my mother?”

“Oh, yes,” the bastard girl flicks black hair out of her eyes. Her smile is easy, secretive. “She came here with the Imp just before the war started.”

Sansa raises a trembling hand to her head, suddenly overcome with the memories; how her mother’s actions brought about the start of the war. All those days she spent with Arya in the Godswood praying, and she had no idea what was to come.

_I just wanted father to wake up,_ she remembers. Now he never will. None of them will return to her, not ever and even on the good days, that’s enough to cripple her blind.

 “She should have stayed here,” Sansa finds herself saying without thinking. Here, hidden on the top of the world, her mother would have been safe, would have lived, would have been here to show her the way.

Mya touches her hair gently, as close to a gesture of affection as Sansa is ever likely to get. “A mother does what she must for her children. Your brother needed her, m’lady, just like little Lord Robert needs you. You’re his mother, now. Keep him safe.”

  She nods, bitterness rising in her throat. She would have kept Rickon and Bran safe too, if she could and their ghosts trail behind her, always out of sight, always lurking around the next corner.

 “Too many children have died,” she agrees softly, thinking not just of her lost family, but of Jeyne Poole, her dearest friend, of Arya’s butcher boy, of the starving little creatures in Kings Landing, the dead baby cradled to a hysterical woman’s chest.

 She thinks of herself, her feet going out from under her on the steps of the Sept as a great yawning blackness rose up to meet her.

“Pass me the white furs please, Mya,” Sansa chokes around the acid in her throat  Staring hard at a fixed point on the horizon, where she imagines Riverrun lies, she blinks away the moisture in her eyes and searches the depths of her bones for some semblance of strength.

_“Put on your Lord’s face,” Catelyn said playfully and Sansa watched as her father laughed –_

and she breathes, sets her features in lovely marble, steel hidden underneath. Beautiful and cold.

_Conquer this,_ she dares them, glowering at the last dregs of pale sunshine. For the briefest instance she imagines whole armies dashing themselves to pieces on her immaculate limbs, broken by the hard cast to her skin. Like the sole ship her husband sent into Stannis’s fleet and set alight, she determines then that if she goes down she’s going to take the world with her.

 “It’s time,” Mya breaks the silence with a smile like white frost on a late summer morning, crisp and clean. “Your Lords and Ladies are here.”

* * *

 _"I don’t want to go with him, Alayne,” he cries and whimpers and she almost slaps him, shakes him silly to_ make _him understand._

_“Sansa,” she reminds him patiently. “You must call me Sansa, Sweetrobin. And you will be fostered because I need you safe, away from here. One day, you will be a great, kind Lord who protects the Vale – and your people will love you as they did your father. But not if you’re dead.”_

_“But-”_

_“Robert.” Her voice is sharp as the icy winds of winter. “You don’t have a choice. You will be taken care of and protected in a safe place by people we trust. Stay here, in the Eyrie, and you will die.”_

* * *

 Bronze Yohn is the first to bow as she descends the steps; the others follow in a matter of moments. Sweetrobin trails along beside her, their hands intertwined. Sansa’s made sure they’re wearing the same shade of blue.

 When the men raise their heads to look at her, she sees a familiar switch flick behind their eyes. She wonders if Joffrey ever looked at her like that, or if she only saw what she wanted to see in the emptiness of his lying Lannister eyes.

 It doesn’t matter, really. They are half in love with her already, her and her claim. When they look at her, all they see is a title and new orifices to fuck. She can live with that; all Sansa sees when she looks at men now is a way back home, carved through blood and bone by the path of a thousand swords.

“Lord Royce,” she greets warmly. “May I present my cousin, Lord Robert Arryn of the Vale?”

Reluctantly, Sweetrobin relinquishes his grip on her hand as Bronze Yohn kneels before his little Lord.

“It will be an honour to have you beneath my roof, Lord Robert,” he says, solemn as the grave. His eyes flicker to Sansa, though, as he regains his feet. She nods once, imperceptibly.

 That night, they feast on pigeon pie with flaky pastry that melts like butter in their mouths, and the last of the summer wine. Sansa doesn’t drink a drop, mindful of drunk kings and drunk queens and the world cracking to pieces around their ears as their speech slurred. And if anyone notices, well, she’s just a silly woman, isn’t she? Just a girl.

  _I am saving your kingdom for you,_ she thinks, sipping at her water delicately, and saying nothing. They can drink the Eyrie dry, if they want. She’ll hand the whole thing over when she’s done, graciously as the queen she once imagined Cersei to be.

All she demands is that they take her kingdom back in return.

 

* * *

_tbc_

* * *


	2. fire, fire, burning bright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sword is where she left it, castle forged steel, waiting under the sea stairs for the feel of her hand. In the night, it gleams like a smile, a promise.

_The Tenderness of Wolves_

* * *

 

The soup is creamy and filling; a hot stew of baked clams and vegetables, with a crust of flaky bread. The Braavosi diet is heavily based in the sea life that lurks off the shore, yet despite the many days she spent selling clams from a stinking wheelbarrow, she’s not lost her liking for them yet.

The roof of Happy Port’s most famous whorehouse, she’s decided, is an excellent place from which to enjoy the view. Below her, merchants and bankers, peasants and sailors scurry about like ants, the occasional titbit of gossip floating up to her on the salty sea air. She didn’t miss that, when she picked the spot some weeks ago. It’s a habit she’s picked up in the House of Black and White, to listen without being seen and snap up scraps of information, storing them in the dark recesses of her brain.

(And if she hears whispers of Westeros, well, that’s just the luck of the draw. She isn’t keeping her ears pricked for news of her only remaining brother, her missing sister. She isn’t waiting for a sign.)

_Let them think I’m gathering information,_ she thinks, wondering, not for the first time, if she is being watched. It’s better than them thinking the alternative, after all.

It’s better than them thinking the truth.

* * *

_“There is one more you must kill,” the Kindly Man says, “before you can become truly faceless.”_

_“I am faceless,” she replies, not chewing her lips as that other girl would have done. He does not accuse her of lying._

_“To serve the Many-Face God, you must be able to kill anyone, girl. Can you do that? Could you give the gift to your mother, if it was asked of you?”_

My mother is dead, _she thinks before she can stop herself, but she’s supposed to not have a mother at all. “Who do you want me to kill? Is it someone I know?”_

_“Who do you know?” The Kindly Man asks her, with that tolerant smile. There’s a trap in there, waiting to spring._

_“No one,” the girl gives him the answer he wants to hear._

_“That’s right,” he agrees. “You are no one and so there is no one that you know. So it does not matter who it is that I send you to kill.”_

 

* * *

 

The name they gave her belongs to a baby. Two weeks old, defenceless, bastard-born; she’s scouted the assignment out with learned precision, calculated and cold.

Absent.

_They are testing me,_ she thinks, not for the first time. She’s known it since she laid eyes on the infant slumbering in its wooden crib. The girl doesn’t want to think about what will happen if she fails.

She doesn’t want to think about where the House of Black and White got its many faces.

 Her spoon clatters against the empty soup bowl as she discards it and hunches against the chilly sea breeze, tracking the movements of ships with her eyes. Getting to Braavos was easy, really. Just an iron coin flashed in the fading sunlight, the worth of which she didn’t entirely understand. Now she understands all too well.

“Valar Morghulis,” the girl murmurs, the words swallowed up entirely by the breeze – the words that called her in with the promise of blood. The girl has a lot of blood on her hands, spilled under many different names. But she knows there is no name out there she could use that would enable her to murder an infant. She cannot. _Will not._

_Father would hate me._ The thought comes out of nowhere, because she’s not supposed to have a father. Faceless assassins don’t have fathers, or mothers, or brothers and a sister.

Faceless assassins aren’t supposed to dream of wolves, either – but she still does. The dreams persist and so does her list of names, even if she no longer speaks that particular prayer aloud. She can still taste their deaths on her tongue; _Cersei, Ilyn Payne, Ser Meryn, Dunsen, Raff the Sweetling…_

Why should a baby be condemned to die, when the likes of them still live?

And the anger starts again, a deep, thrumming rage rising up from deep in her bones. Her head is full of stories from another life; stories of Princess Rhaenerys and Prince Ageon, their lifeless bodies wrapped in blood-stained gold cloaks, of her youngest brother when he was a new-born swaddled in furs and blankets. She remembers how fragile his skull had felt, resting against her thin, little-girl arms, and she had looked up, beaming, while Sansa cooed and Robb lifted Bran up so he could look closer, and her parents, they smiled proudly –

 The memories cut, like the blade of a knife. Sharper, maybe, after being buried so long in the dark.

Five faces, forever stolen from her – five ghosts to be avenged, and they want her to kill dispassionately, at random, for a God that is not her own.

 She’d spit and laugh, if she wasn’t wary of them watching somehow. Kings Landing is a city of unseen eyes, but Braavos is home to men who can change their face at will. She’s spent enough time as Cat of the Canals and Blind Beth to know that anyone could be of the House of Black and White, and she would never know. But they might know of her.

_This is a test,_ she reminds herself again, outwardly expressionless. _And all tests are judged somehow._

Her decision is already made. She wonders if they realise that, yet.

* * *

The sword is where she left it, castle forged steel, waiting under the sea stairs for the feel of her hand. In the night, it gleams like a smile, a promise.

_Needle._

“Stick them with the pointy end,” she whispers, a crouching shadow, wary of watching eyes. There’s a part of her that wants to burn the House to the ground and dance around the flames. They’ll come after her if she doesn’t, she imagines. Maybe. After all, she’s seen too much of their art.

_But he knows, the Kindly Man._ He’s always known the lie she was living, so he can’t have let her get in that far. That they could change their faces, she knew well before she left the shores of Saltpans. Slipping away like a ghost is one thing – and she’s long mastered the knack of shedding lives like a snake shakes off its skin – but actively moving against the Faceless Men is another entirely. Choosing which is least likely to kill her is like rolling a dice and hoping for the best. A calculated risk, either way, but she’s played this game before.

It’s always easier to run.

She’s been running since the day the gold cloaks came and killed her dancing master. The girl wonders now, if maybe it’s time to run home.

 Because the truth is this: the girl has been biding her time. Braavos has taught her how to lie and how to kill, but other lessons came first.

_Quiet as a shadow. Fear cuts deeper than swords._

_When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives._

_The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword._

_Winter is coming._

(And oh, she will make it come. She will hack the Queens head off and wash herself in the blood, watch her feet twitch the way Lord Eddard’s did. She’ll desecrate Joffrey’s grave and tear Ilyn Payne’s eyes out with her fingers, so he can be blind as well as mute.

For the Frey’s, she has other plans.)

The truth is that the girl has spent the better part of a week sitting on the rooftop of a whorehouse listening to the sailor’s gossip, and she’s heard strange tales coming from the East – of a smashed slave trade, of a war on a faraway city, of a silver-haired Queen.

She’s been hearing tales of _dragons._

(And once upon a time, there was a girl called Arya Stark, whose heroes were the Targaryen Queens of old, and who named her direwolf pup for a warrior princess. _Fire and blood,_ are the Targaryen words and deep down, Arya grins, feral and bloodthirsty.)

The truth is this: the girl is tired of poisons and knives in the dark. When the Lannister regime comes crumbling down in a wave of fire, she wants Cersei to look her in the face and see who has brought her to her knees, the way the Queen did to her father.

(The way the Frey’s did to her brother).

When House Stark is revenged, she wants the South to look on her and tremble. Still, she thinks, it would be nice, to have a dragon or three at her back – to be safe forever from plots and beheadings, because _who would go after a house allied with dragons?_

“No one,” the girl says quietly, and smiles. The irony isn’t lost on her.

* * *

Arya Stark leaves Braavos in the early hours of the dawn, on a ship headed for Mereen.

She’ll kill anyone who comes after her.

Standing at the brow, with her eyes ahead, she tastes death on her tongue, sweeter and lovelier than honeyed wine.

“Cersei, Ilyn Payne, Ser Meryn, Dunsen, Raff the Sweetling.” She pauses for a moment, to chew her lip contemplatively. “House Frey.”

She will kill them all, and the thought makes her blood sing, a silent wolf howl rising in the dark. 

Arya is, after all, her mother’s daughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ast line is in reference to season one, when Catelyn tells Robb “First we will get the girls back. And then, we will kill them all.” Also, we all know what goes on with Stoneheart.
> 
> this is a repost - story can also be found on ffnet


	3. when the cold winds blow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I will not let you win,” she tells the winter air, seeing her breath mist before her despite the fire roaring in the grate. The cold is in her bones and she is a child of the North, of Winterfell. She was a wolf, and they all forgot, even she forgot, in her gilded birdcage with the swords and the beatings and the heads mounted on the wall.

She isn’t sure, even now, if she is doing the right thing.

The morning comes, cold and harsh, with a pale dawn, and today they are taking Sweetrobin away. Away from her.

_Fostering is good,_ she thinks. It’s an old tradition, her father told her once, meant to forge good relations between the great Houses of Westeros. Her father himself was fostered here, she remembers, wandered these halls, grew up on this cold, lonely mountain.

Theon was fostered, too, though, and that ended with the deaths of her younger brothers and the ruin of her ancestral seat. And it hits her, then, that when she retakes Winterfell, what awaits her is nothing more than that – a ruin.

  _It doesn’t matter,_ she tells herself, making sure that her expression betrays nothing of what she feels. _There must always be a Stark in Winterfell and I am all that’s left._

“I don’t want to go, Sansa,” Sweetrobin cries into her skirts. He’s finally remembered to call her by her real name, and she bends, wraps her arms around him because he has already lost his mother and father, and she understands what it means to be alone.

“I know,” she tells him quietly, stroking his hair with an ungloved hand. “I don’t want you to go either, Sweetrobin, but I _do_ want you to be safe. And you will be safe with Lord Royce, that I know. And one day, when the war is over, I will come back for you.”

“No one ever comes back,” he sobs, clutching tighter to her waist. She thanks the God’s that this is happening in her solar and not in the yard, where all his Lords and Ladies will see. Rickon would have made a scene, too, she thinks – but he would have kicked and screamed instead of crying.

Bran would not have made a scene at all.

 The thought of her younger brother’s stabs at her, makes her clutch Sweetrobin closer for a moment.

“I will,” Sansa promises, wondering if Robb said the same thing, once. “I will come back. Would you like to see Winterfell, sweetling? You can come and stay with me when it’s safe and I’ll show you everything…the glass gardens, the godswood and the heart tree…all of it. It’s a beautiful place.”

 He nods just once. The Eyrie has not been kind to him, but she has – mayhaps that means he’ll follow her anywhere. However difficult, she has made Robert Arryn love her.

 “Come then. Wipe your tears away.” She dries his face with a wisp of white silk and combs his hair. She herself braids her hair in the style of the North and wraps white fur around her shoulders. Last night she washed the last of the dye out – she has become, again, Sansa Stark.

 They descend the steps together, greet Lord Royce, and say their goodbyes. And it is hard – much harder than she thought it would be – to watch her cousin’s small figure ride away on horseback with men she hardly knows. It feels like losing Bran and Rickon all over again – like waving one last time at Robb before she rode out between Winterfell’s gates, like watching Arya leave the table on that last morning before everything went wrong, and never seeing her again.

  _Oh Arya, are you dead too?_ She must be. The Lannister’s must have killed her quietly – Joffrey hated her enough, after all.

 “Lady Stark,” she doesn’t realise Mya is there until the older girl is cupping her elbow gently.

“I am doing this to save him,” she says, not quite able to draw her eyes away from Sweetrobin’s steadily retreating back.

“It is the right thing,” Mya tells her what she already knows. “The Eyrie is no place for a sickly boy when preparing for war.”

 It is not difficult to see what would happen should she leave Sweetrobin here and one or more of the Houses turned on her. Sansa knows a great deal about the treatment of hostages. Lord Royce is her father’s man, though, honours the bond of friendship between House Stark and House Arryn.

She can only hope it will be enough.

 “Come, the Lords and Ladies are waiting for you.”

Sansa shakes away any signs of doubt and straightens her shoulders, head raised proudly. “It would not do,” she says, “to keep them waiting.”

 

* * *

“The Lannister’s are besieging Riverrun,” Lord Nestor tells her. The fire crackles in the hearth and Sansa sips at her water. No wine.

 “The Frey’s have got Edmure Tully, Lady Arryn’s brother. They threaten to hang him every day if the Blackfish does not yield.”

“They say the Frey’s are all disappearing though. The Brotherhood Without Banners –”

“Everyone involved in the Red Wedding –”

The Riverlands are in chaos, still, despite the annihilation of her brother’s army. The stragglers still loyal to a dead King rebel and the Lannister army pushes back. The smallfolk are mostly gone, hiding or dead. The crops have burned.

 All this, while the might of the Vale hid behind its towering walls.

“No,” she says, speaking for the first time in hours. It’s just a murmur, really, but somehow they all seem to hear. Ser Lothor, Lord Nestor, Myranda Royce – they all turn to look at her with curious eyes.

“No,” Sansa repeats, setting her goblet down gently. “We can’t let that happen. I will not sit back and watch the Riverlands burn like my Aunt did. We cannot let Riverrun fall.”

Riverrun is her mother and a family she has never met – a family she can still save. Riverrun is the only throne her brother had ever known.

The Lannisters have taken everything from her, she thinks, calm and still and quietly, _quietly_ angry. She will not let them take this, too.

 

* * *

 

By the time Bronze Yohn Royce returns, the Eyrie is preparing itself to march. Sansa watches the bustling of the courtyard below with careful eyes, ever watchful for someone she does not recognise, someone who does not belong.

 Even here, there is no telling who might be spying for the Queen. Her solar is empty without Sweetrobin and in the silence she feels as alone as she ever did in Kings Landing, the little bird in a den of lions.

 No one can know of the Vale’s intentions – their strategy relies largely upon surprise; they will scatter the Lannister troops and liberate her mother’s childhood home.

“I will not let you win,” she tells the winter air, seeing her breath mist before her despite the fire roaring in the grate. The cold is in her bones and she is a child of the North, of Winterfell. She was a wolf, and they all forgot, even she forgot, in her gilded birdcage with the swords and the beatings and the heads mounted on the wall.

_Arya wouldn’t have forgotten,_ she thinks, and the thought of her missing sister is enough to make her chest throb with fear, with regret.

“Would you be proud of me, now?” she murmurs into the wind, as if it will carry her words to wherever Arya is, alive, or dead in a ditch somewhere, half buried in the mud. “Would you forgive me for trusting in lions?” She is not sure she will ever be able to forgive herself.

“Lady Sansa?” Myranda asks, slipping into the room quietly, a viper in the grass, or so Petyr would have her believe. If Littlefinger thinks Myranda Royce is dangerous, then she probably is, and that can only be useful.

“He tried to take my name away,” she tells her, turning away from the window. “He dyed my hair and called me Alayne and thought that would be enough to make me forget.”

“Oh, I imagine he thinks he has you right under his thumb,” Myranda agrees, stepping forward to wrap a thick fur mantle around Sansa’s shoulders to keep the chill away. “It’s a very clever game he’s playing – first Harrenhal, then the Vale…”

“Very clever,” Sansa repeats, feeling ice in her fingertips, in her bones. “He is. Cleverer than the Queen by far.” _And much more terrifying._

There is silence for a long time and Sansa feels Myranda slip her hand into her own, squeezing gently. She could almost cry for the simple touch – she’s been alone for _so long._ Friendless for so long. And now she has Myranda with her cleverness and daring, and Mya with her kind words and hands.

“He won’t survive this war,” Myranda promises. “Not after what he’s done here.”

She thinks again of her aunt’s ramblings before Littlefinger shoved her out the Moon Door, hysterics about letters and tears and Lannister’s. She remembers how the King asked her father to be Hand – _why_ he asked him to be Hand.

She remembers her father on the steps of the Sept, and news of a wedding which filtered down from the Riverlands. She remembers Bran falling.

She remembers.

“I think,” she says, quiet and trembling with suspicions she cannot yet prove. “I think he started it.”

Myranda looks at her in surprise, hand tightening reflexively. “Started what, sweetling?”

“The war.”

 

* * *

 

 Outside, they gather steel and food and _men_ and Sansa begins to pack up the household. Dresses are folded hastily into trunks, warm furs cleaned and wrapped up.

She wonders when Harry the Heir will come.

 

* * *

 

He is handsome, her almost-husband. Fair haired, but not golden blond like Joffrey – if he was, Sansa thinks she might have been sick. When she enters the room, he bows low like she once dreamed knights would.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Lady Stark,” he murmurs, looking up at her with grey eyes that remind her, for a moment, of her father. It is only the colour though; Eddard Stark’s eyes held none of the casual laughter that Harry’s did.

“And you, Lord Harrdyng.”

“I was told that I might wed the bastard daughter of Petyr Baelish,” he begins. “But I fear a princess is a little out of my reach.”

“Most men see my claim as a challenge, a prize to be won,” she says, surprised. He only smiles sheepishly, crooked and not unkind. She thinks of the bastards he is rumoured to have sown.

“Alayne Stone might have stayed in the Vale with me, but Sansa Stark will not. Winterfell is a treasure, my lady, but I already have mine.”

It clicks for her then, in the wistful turn of his mouth, the look in his eyes. “You love her.”

“She is the mother of my children. My Aunt will not allow me to wed her though, lowborn as she is. I fear I would not have been a loyal husband to Alayne Stone.”

The relief she feels is almost palpable, she is sure. All the air crashes out of her lungs, because she will not – she will not be made to kneel again, will not be forced into a union she has not chosen. Tyrion Lannister was not unkind to her, to be true, but he was still a Lannister and she could not love him.

 Despite herself, she smiles at him wide and bright, because this man – this is the first time since she left Winterfell, since her father lost his head, that someone has seen her as something other than a puppet they can use. She is heir to the North, and Harry doesn’t care at all.

 “I fear also that Alayne Stone would not have been a good wife, my lord,” Sansa admits.

The smile he returns to her is almost blinding – he is free, they are both free, and she thinks that if they were better acquainted, he would pick her up and spin her around the room for joy.

“Perhaps not,” he replies, taking her hand and pressing a chaste kiss to her skin, the only one he will ever give her. She does not mind. “But I think that mayhaps I could be a good friend to Sansa Stark.”  

_Trust no one,_ Petyr’s voice whispers in her ear and Sansa’s smile widens because she is not Littlefinger who lives for the game of thrones, and it is so long since she has known what it means to have friends to call her own. She pushes the voice aside and squeezes Harry’s hand, just once, before allowing her arm to fall back to her side.

“I would like that,” she says, and means it with her whole heart.

* * *

In the morning, they ride out for Riverrun with the rise of the pearly dawn. The cold wind runs its fingers through her hair as they ride, and Sansa’s eyes are glued to the banners her men carry – that among all the bronze eagles of House Arryn, the grey direwolf running across a white field is the sigil that stands out the strongest. She imagines her brother on horseback riding into battle, his great host all bearing the sigil of House Stark as they fought for freedom, for justice – for _her._ He would have come for her no matter how long it took, this Sansa knows.

 She only wishes she could have dashed to Robb’s rescue the day of the Red Wedding, the way she is now racing to save what remains of his Kingdom.

* * *

_tbc_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just have a lot of Robb feelings. And RW feelings. And let's be honest, Stark!sibling feelings.


	4. like a soldier's heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She rolls onto her side, an ache in her chest which hasn’t left her since the day she dreamed of her mother’s corpse in the river, not even when she was Cat, and Beth and No One.  
> “It’s never going to go away,” she murmurs, though there’s no one left to hear. “The pack is dead.”

On the ship they know her as Freya – a faceless girl with an iron coin. It is easier this way; for all her newfound physical strength, the developing curve of her hips and narrowing of her waist is undeniable. The days of Arry the orphan boy are now far behind her.

But no one looks too long or hard at an acolyte of the House, she’s found. She sleeps with Needle just in case, but no one steals into her small cabin in the dark of night ready for a raping. 

 It is just as well; anyone who tries to force their way into her smallclothes is going to get a blade through their throat and the Captain will definitely not take kindly to that. 

The memory of Chiswyck’s laughter haunts her as vividly as the Tickler’s endless questions. 

_No, not through the throat,_ she thinks. _I’ll hack their bloody cocks off and see how they like being the ones who are violated._

She remembers how Gendry and Hot Pie would lie on either side of her in those long, violent nights before Harrenhal, and she would almost disappear from view between them. There’s no one to hide her now, and there is no hiding the fact that she is a girl either. Maybe not a highborn girl in pretty silks and dresses, but a girl all the same. 

 She feels vulnerable, robbed of the little protection posing as a boy gave her when out in the world alone, though she does her best not to show it. The only one who talks to her at all is the cabin boy, a brown-haired youth about Sansa’s age, who scrubs the deck and ties endless knots of rope for the sailors. 

“You are not Braavosi,” he guesses, as she helps him peel the last of the potatoes brought from White Harbour. Freya is having trouble remembering his name. 

 “Just so,” she agrees, dropping peel into the bucket. “But a girl’s origins are of no importance, kitchen boy.”

“All the men are afraid of you.”

She can’t help the smile that slips out, sly and slightly feral – the ghost of Harrenhal bubbling beneath the surface of her skin. “Good.”

 “But you’re just a little girl,” he says, bemused. “I’ve seen much scarier things than you.”

_So have I,_ she thinks. 

“A girl can have secrets,” she tells him instead. “Mayhaps it’s those secrets which your brave crew fears.” 

“Why?”

She thinks of her father on the steps of the Sept, confessing to a treason he didn’t commit, and the Gold Cloaks who pursued them through the wilderness for a boy named Gendry. 

“Secrets can kill just as sure as blades can, kitchen boy. Did no one ever teach you that?”

Amusingly his face goes stubborn all over, reminiscent of another boy she used to know. Another boy in another life time. 

“Maybe I have a secret too.”

“Everyone has secrets,” she tells him, unimpressed. She has more secrets than anyone she is likely to meet, and he is a fool for throwing the existence of his around. “But yours can’t be that important or you wouldn’t be telling me you have one, stupid boy.”

 The dull flush which spreads over his cheeks is strangely satisfying. Freya can do that to people, make them feel their inadequacies. Arya Underfoot could never make anyone blush, except maybe her foolish sister when she was embarrassed. 

  _Silly Sansa,_ she thinks and the sadness cuts as deeply as any knife could. Her fingers are suddenly clumsy and stiff, the useless fingers of Arya Horseface with her crooked stitches. 

 

* * *

 

 

The nights are the worst part of the voyage. She hates the deep, rhythmic quiet when the sea rolls underneath them, and the sky is an eternity of stars stretching overhead, for that is when she has the most time to think – the most time to remember. Even the blood throbbing through her veins whispering _kill them all kill them all kill them all_ is easier to push aside during the daylight hours because Arya – Arya has spent months being Cat, being Blind Beth, and she knows now how to pretend that simmering rage isn’t there. 

 Freya is just another mask, another name to wear and no protection against the ghosts which have started to come back, the memories which are rising to the surface whether she wants them or no. 

When it goes still and silent, like tonight, there is nothing to prevent her from examining them, the way a tongue probes at a sore tooth over and over. There are no more lessons to learn; no bodies to strip, no poisons to smell, no names to give to the many-faced-God. 

 Lying on her small bed, she stares up at the ceiling and tries to remember the faces of those on her list. “Cersei,” she whispers, but all she can recall now is a curtain of long blonde hair. The Queen was beautiful, that much she knows, but it’s been so long…

_I barely even remember what Joffrey looked like, anymore,_ Arya realises, and it seems so impossible that she could forget these things when she still hates the Lannister’s so much. How can you forget the face of your father’s murderer? 

“He had fat, wormy lips,” she murmurs to herself, closing her eyes. “Sansa thought he was handsome.”

But thinking about Sansa hurts, so she tries not to – tries not to consider the fact that she has no idea where in the world her sister is. Tries not to remember that the last time she saw her, it was as their father lost his head. 

_I hope the rumours are true,_ she thinks viciously, remembering words about a wolf who grew wings and flew away after killing the stupid king. _I hope you watched him die, and were glad._

The Lannisters killed father. They killed Robb and mother, too. She wonders if Sansa had to hear all the grisly details, if they told her everything and watched to see if she would cry. No matter how they drifted apart in Kings Landing, Arya knows that there’s enough wolf in Sansa to deny them that particular satisfaction. She rolls onto her side, an ache in her chest which hasn’t left her since the day she dreamed of her mother’s corpse in the river, not even when she was Cat, and Beth and No One.

“It’s never going to go away,” she murmurs, though there’s no one left to hear. “The pack is dead.”

Inhaling slowly, she tries to remember how to breathe – how to push that awful emptiness down and be angry instead, so full of rage she can taste it on her tongue, a black and bitter thing, like blood. 

She cannot stand to be inside anymore. 

In swift, careful movements she’s out and taking the steps two at a time until her feet are planted on the deck, and there’s the wide, open night around her. She leans against the railings and looks out to 

the shores of Westeros, hidden behind the horizon, and imagines she can see right into Kings Landing, to the steps of the Sept where her father lost his head. The awful emptiness inside her is growing, expanding – eating away at her insides – when all she wants is to bury herself in rage until she can taste it on her tongue, a black and bitter thing like bad blood. 

 She has no use for sorrow but her vision is blurring all the same, and the stars threaten to rain down around her head if unwanted tears happen to spill over. 

“They’re dead, stupid,” she whispers to herself. “They’re _dead._ But you’re not.” 

Against all odds, Arya Stark has survived – battered, bruised and bleeding, perhaps, but undeniably alive, even if it’s only in the meanest sense of the word. Even the House wasn’t enough to bury her, the grizzly remains of a girl once called Underfoot, once called Horseface. 

 She leans over the railing to stare at her rippling reflection, at the long face and solemn grey eyes she never wanted. Her own face. 

Her hair is growing back, at last, falling just past her shoulder blades. She is taller, thinner, than she remembers being, but for the first time in a long time, she looks like a girl. 

_Almost pretty,_ she thinks distantly, surprised. She looks like Jon.   

She looks like father. 

And that – that is the hardest thing in wearing her own face, to see others in her reflection, and yet know that it holds no resemblance to everyone else whom she has lost. 

_The lone wolf survives…_

Father was wrong; when the cold winds came it was the pack who died instead, and their ghosts follow her wherever she goes. 

Her hands clench and unclench around the worn, wooden railing. The air smells salty, and if she closes her eyes, she can almost imagine it is the scent of blood, heavy and metallic, a salty rusty stench she knows well. She imagines it spilling across the deck in a red, wet river, soaking through her shoes. One day she will walk through pools of Lannister blood barefoot and feel it squelch between her toes, and oh, she will _dance_ then. That hatred bubbling in her veins is the only thing which can even begin to drown out that frightening, hollow place in her chest which whispers in the night, whispers of her own, sweet death by her mother and brother’s side –

 “Cersei,” Arya says, to the cool, clear night. “Ser Ilyn. Dunsen. Raff the Sweetling. House Frey…”

She has chosen to be Arya Stark, and that means accepting all the ghosts that come with her. 

 

* * *

She dreams of wolves and forests and a river with three forks, banners with lions and towers fluttering in the wind. She dreams of her black brother hunting somewhere in the cold. 

_Home,_ a voice calls urgently and she is too much the night-wolf to recognise it. _Home, home, come home, come home._

 

* * *

 

 “Where are you from?” the boy asks, and Arya knows his name now, though she will never tell him hers. Not her true name. A thousand and one lies dance on her tongue, easy and light as air. She has been so many people; Arry, Nan, Weasel, Salty, Squab, Cat, Beth – 

Watching Zak shrewdly, Needle balanced on her bony knees, she asks, “What do you know of the North?” 

His eyebrows pinch together, eyes narrowing. “This ship came from Eastwatch. There’s trouble at the Wall, I know that much.”

The air is salty and wet, sea spray soaking her hair. It takes everything she has to stop her face from showing the sudden worry in her chest, sharp and cold like the press of a blade. “What kind of trouble?” 

“Wildlings, it was. At first.” 

“At first?”

“There were dead things,” he whispers, eyes downcast and afraid. “In the water. When we were sailing through the Bay of Seals. I saw them, I did.”

A hundred and one stories fill her head, long forgotten. Those hushed whispers of Old Nan’s belong to another life, another Arya Stark – she’s long since learned there are worse things to fear than snarks and grumpkins, those imaginary monsters which used to hide under Bran’s bed. And yet –

 Jon told her about the day they found the direwolves – the deserter, his mad ramblings, how Bran had not looked away. 

 “He said he saw the whitewalkers,” Jon said, more puzzled than amused. Arya had scowled at him. 

“That’s stupid. The whitewalkers lived thousands of years ago, everybody knows that.”

Now she looks at the vast ocean around them and wishes the ship was headed to White Harbour instead. 

“Dead things?”

“People,” Zak whispers, and it comes, oh how it comes – that cold dread from her dreams, from a day in the rain by a bridge where she heard a wolf screaming. From a day when she stood in the midst of a thunderous crowd and watched helplessly as her father was shoved to his knees. 

 She’s on her feet without realising, her work abandoned. The sky is cloudy, a solemn grey like Jon Snow’s eyes, and she can feel the promise of a storm in the air. 

“Freya?”

Facing the waves, she gulps for breath and tries to remember how to be someone else. She has chosen to be Arya Stark, though, and for the first time in months, she realises that stupid girl comes with more than just ghosts and memories which cut like shards of glass.

“My brother is at the Wall,” she murmurs, and this time it is not Kings Landing she imagines somewhere beyond the waves, and she is afraid. 

It’s dawning on her that despite that ragged hole in her heart, Arya Stark still has something to lose. 

* * *

  
_tbc_   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. vomits  
> 2\. why does Arya never behave for meeeeee :(


End file.
